Impossible Assimilations, American Liberalism, and Jewish Difference: Revisiting Jewish Secularism

Abstract

To remain marked as other even in the process of becoming citizens, of becoming incorporated into the nation, still haunts contemporary Jewish experience as well as efforts to explain Jewish difference. Although it may be said that the French and American revolutions brought Jews into the dominant cultures of the West, they also set limits on this very promise of inclusion. In this essay I am interested in these limits as they have been enacted and reenacted in the United States, especially after the mass migration of Eastern European Jews to this country at the turn of the last century. I am concerned about the ways tolerance works to both regulate and maintain a deep ambivalence around Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism in U.S. society, even in the present. By retracing the legacy of Jewish emancipation in the West alongside a legacy of Jewish enlightenment and modernity as experienced in Eastern Europe, and then seeing what happened as these two distinct visions of Jewish modernity came into conflict in the United States in the early twentieth century under the umbrella of the liberal inclusion, I show how this vision of inclusion had no place for Eastern European Jewish secularism, the legacy of Yiddish secularism that characterized the Jewishness of so many of these immigrant Jews. Turning to the archive, I offer a reading of some the arguments of the last generation of these secular Yiddishists as presented in the pages of Judaism: A Quarterly of Jewish Life and Thought, a journal founded in 1952 in the U.S. with the explicit goal of reviving Jewish religious thought. Noting the irony of these discussions in the pages of this explicitly religious journal, I make a case for revisiting the ways these Yiddish thinkers struggled to make their Jewish cultural stance make sense in the context of American religious pluralism. In this way, I reconsider the legacy of liberal inclusion for Jews and what it might mean for there to be a place for not only secular Jews, but a whole range of Jewish positions in the contemporary United States.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.